Blood and Brains
When the light turns green, you go. When the light turns red, you stop. But what do you do when the light turns blue with orange and lavender spots? - Shel Silverstein
---
I was unsure about dosage, that was the first problem.
As prepared as I was - as I thought I was, rather - mentally, physically, logistically, I'd never actually handled LSD beyond purchasing it from Kenny, my drug dealer who wasn’t really a drug dealer, and stuffing it into the back of a drawer for safekeeping. I had two kinds: paper and liquid. Both were wrapped in small pieces of foil, presumably secure from the spoiling effects of air, heat, moisture. Really, I had no idea, because I'd never so much as looked at the stuff. I'd just bought it sight unseen, figuring when the time came I could consult my young provider for guidance. Which is exactly what I tried to do.
I texted Kenny at 6:15 pm. Hey, got a sec? But Kenny was busy doing whatever it is he does in between selling me psychoactive drugs. Terence and I were on our own.
We opted for the blotter paper, which was at least divided into obvious, square-shaped portions. (By contrast, the rubber band-thin "ten strip" of liquid acid had no delineating marks. Determining where one hit ended and the next started looked to be a matter of pure guesswork.) There were three squares of paper, which corresponded with my vague recollection of having bought that amount over a year earlier. Why I bought three instead of two or four or even just one, I have no idea. Maybe I thought I wanted a spare, in case I lost one? Without any further thought or discussion - we'd agreed earlier that I would take more than Terence, since it was my idea, my birthday wish, my funeral, etc - I tore the paper, handed my boyfriend one third of it and popped the other two thirds into my mouth.
It was awful. Terribly, startlingly bitter - how I imagine battery acid would taste. We winced, surprised at just how bad it was. Terence plucked the soggy square from his tongue after a few moments. "Nuah!" I barked, my mouth gone numb with chemical. "Youah haf to ret it dissov alla way!" The one thing I knew for sure is that the blotter paper must be allowed to disintegrate completely. Watching one another with eyes wide but lips pursed shut, we let the drug work its way into our blood and brains.
Still holding the softened squares on my tongue, I went to take a shower.
Intention. A big part of successful drug use is finding - feeling - good intention. That's what I focused on, as I washed the grime of the day's hiking from my hair. I felt one hundred percent sure that I was going to have a positive experience. That having controlled my "set and setting" (the who and where of tripping, said to be of tremendous importance), I was already ahead of the game. And maybe I would have been, if the game had been based in anything resembling reality. But it wasn't. And as I was about to learn, not only did I not know the rules or the objective of this game - for much of the next several hours, I wouldn't even understand I was playing it.
It set in quickly. Much, much more quickly than I'd been expecting. Showered and dressed, we'd decided to sit on the front stoop, take in the desert dusk, let things unfold organically. Hilariously, I'd put on my fuzzy bear hat. Not quite a spirit hood, but a close cousin. I guess I thought it would make me feel adventurous, or playful, or even animalistic. But within minutes I'd forgotten I was even wearing it. Within minutes the clothes on my body, so carefully considered when I packed, were comically unimportant.
An upright, oblong, ridged planter in the yard was a cockroach. The change wasn't sudden....because there wasn't any change at all. It had always been a cockroach. Segmented. Humanoid. Taunting. The spindly fauna that shot up from behind it formed perfect antenna. Again, this wasn't a matter of something becoming, or seeming to become different, in the way that psilocybin gently rolls out hallucinations. This was just fact. A new reality. There was a massive, live stone cockroach watching me, feet from where I stood, and there was no unseeing it. No unknowing it.
I tried to shift my attention to the breeze rustling through the trees, to the dusty glow settling over the boulders that cradled the estate. But no matter where I redirected my thoughts, it was like grasping the shifting mechanism on an amusement park ride - like being granted the briefest glimpse of control before getting wrenched sharply back onto the track. No question: I was a passenger, not a driver. It was then that an inkling of what I was in for dawned on me. Big. This is bigger. Bigger than I. Wow. This is.
I tried to play along. I walked over to the waist-high planter, smiling determinedly as I pointed the creature out to Terence. "Do you see it? It's a bug! Look, do you see it?" The question seemed stupid as I spoke it. Of course he saw it. He had to. It was as real and clear as the sky above. But Terence was already slipping down his own slide, and any intuition with which he might have soberly grasped my state of mind (i.e., Anxiety trying not to acknowledge Fear peering in the window) had melted away with his blotter paper.
"Do you like insects?" he replied, and to my already apprehensive self that was exactly the wrong question. It felt like a dare, or maybe a warning. Like he was purposefully trying to wedge open a window I didn't want opened. No I do not fucking like insects. All at once I was unbearably dizzy.
"I'm going inside," I announced, feeling defeated by my body load, disappointed at already having to forfeit the beauty of our surroundings. The whole point. Joshua Tree. Sunset's coming. The whole point was to. Terence offered to join me but I pointed at him severely, then swept my hand out in reference to the landscape around us. "No. You stay put. I just need a minute."
I shut the door behind me and took a few wobbly steps into an empty, silent house. It gave me all of ten seconds, I'd say, before beginning to breathe, bulge, pulse and twist in a way that made it clear any authority I'd had on psychedelics was about to be shred to bits. Colorful, beautiful, terrifying, wondrous, unforgettable bits.
Part two
The fire and the rose, as it were, became one. - Federico Fellini
—-
Twenty minutes into my first acid trip, I realized that the heavily stylized filmic interpretations of LSD experiences I'd been watching all my life were not the exaggerations I'd always assumed them to be. They were in fact faithful representations. Walls really did drip. Edges really did bleed. Color and shape really did squeeze one another until it felt like my brain was folding in on itself, my consciousness slipping and sliding endlessly, with nothing firm or real enough to hold onto.
Terence (who by now had also come back inside) tells me that for several minutes, in the beginning, he watched my face transform with wonder as I stared, mouth agape, at various objects around the house shifting and morphing. Paintings, lamps, chairs. And I remember this. I remember smiling, squinting in curiosity, laughing. And in those moments when it got too intense, I verbally reminded myself that I wasn't new to hallucinations. "It's a good thing I've taken shrooms before," I said loudly, like a bragging child. "Because this is like...you know?" He knew.
LSD plays with time, expanding or compressing it as, I guess, one's brain sees fit. There was a moment early on when Terence was right beside me and then snap! he was on the other side of the house, seemingly instantly. On the other hand, the two to three hours of "bad" tripping I did was interminable. But whether I was in a state of stability, sublimity, or hell, time divided itself up into what I'd later refer to as "segments". I recollect what I experienced sensorily, emotionally, and psychologically in these chunks of time. I suppose they are how my brain decided to make sense of what it went through. A library of tiny little multi-dimensional videos, filed neatly away in my mind. Fucking amazing, really.
One of the first segments felt like a conspiracy between color and geometry. Every surface burst into hexagons, or maybe heptagons? I remember thinking of chicken wire. And I do mean every surface, including skin - my own and Terence's. And no sooner had I noticed the pattern on our bodies than it was scales. Reptilian. A little weird, but nothing I couldn't handle. The scales began to lift and develop dimensionality. You know how it looks when you add a drop shadow to an object, in graphic design? That's what it was like. Only the shadow peeking out from underneath was both color and light. (One note I wrote soon afterward reads "it was like someone was using the pucker and bloat tools right behind my eyes".)
And then this segment - which was like an orientation to LSD's visual aspects - chopped itself up into smaller pieces of time, so there'd be minutes at a stretch where every surface was outlined in lime green and hot pink heptagons. Then electric blue and lavender ones.
Then suddenly the color/pattern visuals evaporated and everything went fuzzy and staticky, as if I'd been sucked into a television set left on after programming ended. Silvery-grey, glinting, snowy. I remember seeing Terence just a few feet away from me, made of the stuff. It was beautiful and so strange, and I marveled at the moment. I marveled at all of it. It really is like this. It really is the rabbit hole. I had no idea. No idea at all.
But for all the beauty, it was also incredibly overwhelming. Every second was more disorienting than the last. The air was thick, heavy, vibrating. I'd compare it to being underwater with your eyes open, just below the surface. Waves blurring the view when you look up at the sunny sky. Now imagine you can't get back above the water. You can breathe somehow, that's not the issue. But everything you know as normal and real - the world you want to get back to - is out of reach. And in fact you're sinking deeper, and you know you're going to stay under for a very long time. Can you handle it? Or will you freak out?
I freaked out.
No amount of telling myself that I was prepared for this helped. I was in over my head and I was scared. Deep down I knew I had a long night ahead of me, but I didn't want to face that. So instead I tried to speed things up. I chugged water, trying to flush the drug through my system. (It only refreshed the sour taste of it on my tongue, which, probably psychosomatically, then just refreshed the intensity of the experience.) I asked Terence over and over: "How long, do you think? How long will it last?" And I threw up. A lot. Gotta hand it to my body. The acid hadn't gone through my digestive system - it wasn't sitting in my stomach, it was coursing through my veins. But on some level my body knew to try and reject what I'd given it, in the only way it could.
Poor Terence. He had no idea what was happening with me. He says he realized pretty quickly that I was in a bad way. Indeed, I sensed his anxiety, despite the reassuring tone he adopted, and it made things exponentially worse for me. I grew panicky. What the fuck were we doing? We were in the middle of the desert, hours from anyone we knew. This is bad, I thought. This is really...this is bad.
It was about this time that I started singing my LSD song.
I call it a song now, because later I came to see it as such. As something funny and sort of poetically, tragically beautiful. But really, it was just a series of questions and statements. Questions and statements that I said over and over and over again, because I was lost and frightened and desperately trying to find a thread of reality to cling to. Because truly, I thought I'd lost my mind.
Well, that's not exactly right. I thought I'd broken my mind. Overdosed. Unhinged it, with toxic chemicals. Damaged it beyond repair. Do you know what it's like to be utterly and completely convinced that you're going to be committed to an insane asylum? I do, now.
Fucking. Terrifying. Beyond words terrifying. Mad. I've gone mad. That's it. It's over. Everything I had, everything I knew. Gone. I could see it already. Straightjacket. Wheelchair. Padded room. Oh, it's so sad about Ellie. She was so smart, so talented. Just a drooling mess now. I could imagine their pity, their revulsion. Deeper and deeper I sank in my conviction that it was just a matter of time. I wasn't coming back. I wouldn't be normal again. I'd be forever lost to my former self and former life, gazing outward at it, locked within the hell of my splintered mind. Heartbroken. For several of the darkest seconds of my life, I knew that had there been a gun in front of me, I might have tried to shoot myself.
But while 99% of me was sure that life as I'd known it was over, there was, deep within my brain, a bell ringing. Faintly, so fainty, I could hear it. Its ring was the promise of normalcy. A remembrance of it, far away through space and time. Some tiny part of me knew that this was just an experience, and it would eventually end. But that bell, oh my god it was so heartwrenchingly quiet, so unconvincing. .....ding.......ding..... I wanted to believe in it, more than anything I wanted to trust it, but the counterbalance of what the acid was doing made it so. very. difficult.
"Did I break my brain?" That was the first line of the song. And every "no" answer was a ring of the bell. I asked Terence this, over and over and over. He patiently reassured me I did not. But I was still falling down, down, and I didn't believe him. I scrambled for my phone.
"Are you looking at pictures?" he asked encouragingly.
"No," I said flatly, trying to focus on the electric blur of numbers before my eyes. "I have to call Mason. Will you call him for me?"
Of course he would, understanding that in this moment of unbearable fear, I'd need the friend who's gotten me through a dozen other moments of unbearable fear. I needed my friend of almost twenty years, and I needed him right fucking now.
"Yo," he answered.
"Mase," I blurted, putting him on speakerphone. "Mase, I'm in Joshua Tree, and I took LSD, and I'm really scared I took too much. Please help me. I don't know what to do."
And so it began. The phone conversation that would shape the next several hours of my first acid trip. The conversation that would color and inform my experience, give it meaning and structure and even a theme. Simply put: friendship. Friendship on the most profound, breathtakingly beautiful level imaginable.
But first back to the song.
Naturally, Mason did everything in his power to calm and comfort me, from the bar in Las Vegas where he happened to be that Saturday night. (Yep, that's right. Me and my two hundred micrograms of lysergic acid diethylamide parachuted in to my dearest, oldest friend's vacation smack in the middle of Sin City and hijacked the shit out of it. Not a single peep of complaint, the entire two and a half hours I kept him on the phone. Ladies and gentlemen, that is what you call a friend.) He told me I was going to be fine. That if I'd taken too much, I wouldn't be talking to him now. That Terence sounded coherent and sober enough to judge whether or not I really needed to go to the hospital, and they agreed I did not. That I just had to relax and buckle in for the ride. That everything was okay.
Still, I needed to hear the same mantra of assurances repeated time and again.
"Did I break my brain?" (no)
"Am I going to survive?" (yeah)
"I'm so scared..." (you're gonna be fine)
"What about dehydration?" (that's just the drug)
Wispy threads though they seemed, they were a lifeline to me as I dangled in the abyss. And so these questions I asked, combined with the answers I was given, became like a song over the course of the night. And it kept me alive. And if that sounds crazy, I understand. But if not for the anchor which was Mason's voice holding me safely in place, in that beautiful house in the desert, I don't know what I might have done in that first couple of hours. But it probably would have involved fleeing my own boyfriend and running out into the dark, dangerous night, desperate for help and relief. I know I wouldn't have even made it ten steps outside without falling to the ground, though, because I was physically incapacitated by the drug. I probably would have just lay down in the dirt and screamed.
This story is getting away from itself, I know, but holy hell is it hard to explain everything that was happening at once. But here's how to picture me in these moments: pinned to the cool white vinyl lounge chairs we'd flattened and pushed together in the living room. On them was a mess of blankets that I rolled around on, clutching the edges of the cushions for dear life, as I frantically tried to get my psychological bearings. I was terribly thirsty but didn't feel like I could drink. I was nauseous and dizzy and disoriented, and nowhere that I looked made it any easier. I had a dim awareness of Terence moving around the room, getting water, trying to help me. But looking at him only freaked me out more; his skin was unnaturally alive, shifting and oozing as if liquid. The shape of his face was distorted and ugly, and I turned away in fear that image would imprint itself permanently in my mind. All I could do was stare at the phone, at the letters of Mason's name which glowed white in the slow-settling dusk. A life raft. His voice a rope thrown to me on an ocean of fire.
Fire. That was another thing. So hot. Not my body, which was cool, pleasantly chilly even, from air conditioning that felt like wind moving through the house. But my brain boiled with the heat of too much...everything. Too much color and light, too much fear, too much resistance. Because oh my god, was I ever resisting. Mason called it out. "Listen to me," he said. "Are you listening?" I was. "You have to stop fighting it."
A surge of fresh terror. "I can't!" How could I make him understand the depths of hell that awaited me, if I'd just give in to them? "Mase, I can't. It's too much!"
"Listen to my voice," he continued firmly. "You know this. You know this because you've done drugs before. If you fight it, it's going to be a lot harder. Just give in and let it happen."
I knew he was right, of course. I knew the only way out was through. But oh my god. The way my mind was melting, sucking the rest of me down into it. The helplessness was utterly terrifying. What would I find there, if I did let go? Where would I go? Letting go felt like jumping blindly into a black hole. Less giving in than giving up - on reality, and on sanity. (From my notes afterward: sanity a placemat that kept shifting under my brain.)
It didn't matter, though. It didn't matter one bit whether I wanted to resist or embrace the LSD that was blazing new neural pathways faster than I could take a breath. I was approaching my peak and any ideas I had about controlling or guiding my experience were long, long gone. I could no sooner stop what was happening than stop a roller coaster, mid-loop.
But the good thing about roller coasters is they go up, as much as they go down.
part three
Everything was love. Everything will be love. Everything has been love. Everything would be love. Everything would have been love. Ah, that was it, the truth at last. Everything would have been love. - Iris Murdoch
---
I'm starting to understand. There's no going back. There's no stopping or even slowing down. All the scrambling I've been doing to stay above the surface is wasted energy. I have no choice but to sink. Breathe and sink. The nausea has subsided. Fear is still here, but really all I'm afraid of is how intense it is. I'm starting to understand that it will end, that I will be okay. In fact I am okay, right now. This is what I wanted, after all. It's not what I expected, it's so much bigger and deeper and brighter and breathtaking - but it's not going to kill me. My song changes: a tiny bloom of hope, of humor and light in the dark.
"Mason! Mason!" (I'm here)
"Did I break my brain?" (no)
"Did I...did I just open it a little wider?" (hahaha...yes)
"Am I going to survive?" (yeah)
"I'm so scared" (you're gonna be fine)
"What about dehydration" (that's just the drug)
"I'm on an acid trip!" (haha, that's right)
"Is this going to make a good story?" (oh yeah)
"Am I in a story now?" (yep)
Minutes go by, and I'm not sure if they feel more like hours or seconds. The most important things are remembering to breathe and refreshing my lifeline - asking for reassurance. But even speaking has become nearly impossible, because my mind is now continually dropping down through a series of trap doors. Or rather, my consciousness. The most essential, purest part of me. Just when I think it can't possibly go further, it does. I'm a galaxy away from home, where home = the regular bounds of perception.
There is a poverty of language to describe what I'm beginning to experience, and what will continue on in my brain, for the next several hours. It isn't thought, and and isn't feeling. It's more than vision or belief or emotion. The word that comes closest to explaining is "awareness", but even that isn't right. What's happening is so powerful and awe-inspiring that all I can do is retreat to a corner of my own self, sit quietly, arms wrapped around my knees, and watch in amazement.
I am starting to understand how much more there is.
And there is so, so, so much more than I ever could have dreamed.
---
What you know of the real world, of everyday life. What if you could encapsulate it, hold it in your hands like a crystal sphere? Say to yourself, This. This is what I know to be true and real. These are all the experiences of my lifetime and also all that remains possible, for the rest of it.
And what if inside that sphere was another sphere, which contained another, which contained another. An infinite nesting of alternate realities, where the deeper you go, the more would be revealed to you. You wouldn't be able to explain the things you learned. You could only accept and marvel, humbled by the hugeness of it all. It leaves you breathless, awestruck, grateful. It's moving so fast, filling you up and dazzling you, making your heart pound, leaving you limp in its wake. You're coasting around in your own mind, blindingly fast, seeing its million tiny folds and pockets, all at a glance. There is a whole other universe inside your brain. You had no idea. No idea.
Meanwhile, there is still the outside world, solidly in the acid's grip. You've reached a point where you can take it in. It is no longer a nightmare. It is. It is. Oh my god it is.
Beautiful.
You lift your spinning head from where you've been cowering, and you see. And you feel.
Color. That is the first thing.
---
You timed it perfectly. Sunset. You chose the perfect place. A home with windows all around. This sunset - how will you make them understand? It's a painting, an impressionist painting that the house sits inside. Streaky clouds wrap themselves all around it. Pinks, blues, purples. It is a living thing, this sunset. It is part of the story. Is it telling the story?
It's unbearable. Your heart might break, it is so beautiful. Pinks, blues, purples. These colors will stay with you forever. Indelible. You will always choose them, you will always go back to them. You will seek them out, clothe yourself in them, fill your home with them, tint your photographs to match them. Unforgettable. You didn't even like purple before today. Now it is forever emblematic of this night, a secret wink of the rainbow. I know what you did, what you saw. I was there and I'll remember. I'll remind you.
And there's the wind. It isn't wind, of course. It's just air conditioning circulating through the house, strong as it is, set to high. But you think it's wind, right now. You think you and Terence and the entire home have been swept up in a current of it, are floating on it, it moves through the house and through you, lifting everything up to a higher plane. Nothing has ever felt so good. The edge of chill, almost almost almost too cold but not. And it has a sound, a song like yours. Wind was never so loud, filling your ears, roaring and rushing like a waterfall.
---
The shifts are almost violent in suddenness. One moment I'll be on the upswing of some blissful burst of perception, the next I'll be dropped into a mire of anxiety. And it all has to do with the call I'm still on.
Mason. Speakerphone. Vegas.
Talking me through it. Not angry at all. Patient, sympathetic - even amused. When I feel these positive emotions coming through the phone, I am calm, even giddy. Able to laugh about the craziness of what I'm doing. But the second I sense frustration or annoyance or even just fatigue, I panic. And plummet, psychologically. And all of this is manifested in my physical view of the phone itself. When I perceive all is well, it appears radiant, throwing off beautiful sparks of light, his name at the top pulsing with reassuring life. And wondrously: hot to the touch. When I grow fearful that he's bored or antsy, wishing to end the call, the phone darkens ominously, grows icy cold like steel in winter.
---
And then.
---
The first breakthrough of true, of real, of unspeakable, heart-stopping joy. Out of nowhere. A lighting bolt that splits me, shatters the crystal sphere into a billion pieces. And as those pieces rush to reassemble themselves, they become something new. A chandelier. A crystal chandelier that is lighting my - me - everything - up in the most beautiful (I can't), breathtaking (Oh god, is it possible?) way imaginable.
I gasp. My mind gasps. My heart gasps. It cannot possibly be real, this much joy. It cannot possibly. I cry out, singing my song, because now more than ever I need to believe that I really am alive and okay, because I had no idea --- no idea that --
"Mason! Mason!" (I'm here)
"Did I break my brain?" (no)
"I'm on an acid trip!" (yeah you are)
"Is this going to make a good story?" (yep)
"Am I in a story now?" (sure are)
"Oh my god, I am. I am! And it's so beautiful! Do you see? Do you see?? It's. so. beautiful...."
---
It doesn't last. There are dips. Some of these lows are pure horror, still. But slowly, the frequency with which I am rocketed back up to peaks of sublimity increases.
And now I'm faced with the task of making you understand what was on some of those peaks.
---
Take the word "happiness." Plant it in a garden. Water it and tend to it until it bears fruit. Take the seed of that fruit and plant it in another garden. Repeat this process over and over for your entire life, and maybe - maybe - at the end of it, a word will grow and bloom, descended from the word "happiness" (but so far removed from it as to be unrecognizable) that will capture what it was like on those peaks.
part four
How thin and insecure is that little beach of white sand we call consciousness. - Athol Fugard
Life has many doors! - Kenny
---
You have to start at the bottom, if they're going to appreciate what the top was like.
You have to describe that dark, ugly place. You have to be honest. Tell them about the three square feet of hallway between the bathroom and the living room. The space where, for several agonizing minutes (are you sure? are you sure it was only minutes?) you huddled, comatose with fear. Imprisoned by the certainty of insanity. Tell them about the taste of vomit in your mouth. About the spongy, putrid green loops of the bathmat inches from your face. How they quivered disgustingly, like fat, hairy caterpillars. How squashed and humiliated you felt, admitting to yourself that despite all your grand plans, you were having a bad trip.
Tell them how you prayed for it to be over. Oh god please, please just let this end. How you swore you'd never touch LSD again, and how you kept asking Terence why anyone would ever do this to themselves. How you made him swear that the two of you would never speak of it again. Okay? Promise?
I promise, baby. I promise.
Not my drug you announced, with forced lightheartedness. It'll be okay, though. No big deal. And now I know. Not my drug. But even as you said all this, your heart was seizing up with dread, because you knew you'd only just stepped inside the funhouse. And the door was locking behind you. And the timer had just been set, with twelve. hours. to go.
Make sure they grasp the unspeakable terror. The wretched paranoia. The crushing hopelessness. All accompanied, of course, by the massive bewilderment that is LSD's perception mindfuck. Everything you think you know about the physical world, about yourself, about life itself - nope. That stuff isn't here right now, sorry. Please call again later. Don't forget to mention fractals, those collusions of blackness and color that swallowed you up the instant you closed your eyes. How suffocating they were, and how inescapable.
Okay. Now let that part go.
Now tell them about the rest.
---
I'm screaming.
I'm screaming and laughing at the same time. I've never made this sound before. Terence has never heard anyone make this sound before. There are tears running down my face, but they're not the sad kind. If you heard me from a room away, you'd probably think someone I love had died. There's a quality to my cries that I recognize, even as they pour out of me: inconsolableness. But what I'm actually experiencing is in fact profound acceptance. Inversely related cousins, if you think about it.
I'm in the throes of pure, psychological ecstasy - what I'll later call a consciousness-gasm, because that's the only way I can describe it. It's unlike anything I've ever known or dreamed of knowing. I'm crying out, because I can't keep it inside of me. Oh my god oh my god I cry, and I am wracked with disbelieving sobs. It's so beautiful! It's...so...beautiful... I know without a doubt that nothing in my life will ever compare to this moment. Nothing will ever be as true and perfect and sublime. I could live a hundred lifetimes and nothing I could ever see or feel could touch this. Wonderment. Discovery. Understanding. Validation. Love.
I'm peaking.
Thunderbolts of revelation are slicing through me and sending out ripple after ripple of joy. It started with the realization of how lucky am, to have a friend to help me through this experience. Gratitude, but on a level that nearly devastates. The beautiful thing that is my friendship with Mason - it is blinding me with happiness, as my mind stretches to appreciate, in a split second's flash, nearly two decades of laughter and Platonic love.
For the first time ever I see the whole glorious arc of it, this friendship. The universe has few more precious gifts to offer, I understand that now. A hundred thousand moments that have led up to this one. Astoundingly, he seems to understand, too. I ask him if he sees it, and when he says he does, it's like we're reciting the lines of an ancient script. We're reenacting a story that has existed since long before we were ever born. And I know that if I die tomorrow, this amazing, precious friendship will stand as one of the most beautiful things I've ever made.
And this understanding ripples outward.
It ripples out to the bigger picture of my life, and who I am as a person. My very place in the universe. And oh my god, I see now. I see that I belong. I see that I what I have to give this world matters. I see that I have a purpose. My mind clears and a vision of myself emerges fr the void. Still I can see it perfectly. In this vision I'm beautiful in all the ways I've always wanted to be. A sort of spirit-self. I see myself laughing, my face in profile, as if looking at a loved one. In fact I know I'm surrounded by people who love me. I can feel all the ways that they appreciate me, that they see the good in me. It is a kind of validation, this vision, but more profound than anything I can try to relate with words, now. As if the universe pulled back a curtain, gave me just the tiniest, dazzling peek. Okay, Ellie. You want to know? You want to see? This is who you are.
It's breathtaking. Self-love. Self-acceptance. A shell around my heart cracks, so it can grow a little bit bigger.
And then there is Terence.
Oh my god. I cannot. It will kill me, if I look it full in the face. His love. The sweetness. His purity and kindness. His peacefulness. It astonishes me, how evolved and good he is. There was never anything so. Never anything.
All of this comes and goes in degrees of varying intensity for about an hour. It's coupled with the most exquisite sense of visual "blooming" imaginable. The pinks, blues, purples I mentioned before spread out behind Terence, a backdrop the beauty of which a poet gifted with the languages of a thousand worlds could not capture.
LSD: Justifying Hyperbole since 1943.
My song changes one last time.
"Mason! Mason!"
"Oh my god, do you see it? Do you see it?"
"It's so beautiful. It's perfect."
"Do I love LSD? Do I hate it?"
"This is changing my life."
---
At some point, Kenny calls. Seeing his name infuses me with delight and gratitude. I realize he's calling to make sure I'm okay. He's gotten my text from earlier and probably remembered I was going to do LSD for my birthday, and is now checking in. My twenty-five year old drug dealer is a really good fucking guy.
Terence laughs as grinning, I grab up the phone. "Kenny!" I cry. "Kenny, are you there?!"
"Ellie, what up girl." I can hear he's grinning, too.
"Kenny you have to write this down. Okay? This is very important. You have to get a pen. Do you have a pen?" He laughs and I hear shuffling. I've tipped my hand. He knows I'm flying. I laugh, too, and continue, my voice like a kid's on Christmas morning. "You. This! Kenny I'm having the most incredible experience of my life. And you made it happen. You did this for me. And I will never forget it. LSD is the most. I can't. You did this!"
Kenny is greatly amused, but I can tell he's really happy for me. "Awww, girl. I'm so glad you're having a good time. Enjoy!" I end the call and beam at Terence. This too is unbearably beautiful.
The next day Kenny will text. Love you!
Dude, I answer. I had no idea. Life changing.
Life has many doors! he replies back, and I just smile.
---
Denouement.
A slow, gently rocking comedown. Hours have gone by. Lifetimes in each. We hold one another in the front room, watching the moonlit highway. Blues the likes of which I didn't know existed. Perception is still liquidy, still upended and murky...but the twists and turns have leveled off enough to bearable. Pretty. Playful. Unthreatening. This was an experience. This was not real life. I'm going to be myself again. Wow. I did it.
......wow.
Terence slips outside to meditate under the stars. I lay shellshocked in the living room, gathering back into myself a billion slivers of wonder. I'm awed by how much I remember. In fact it's all wondrously vivid. I pledge to write as much as I can, as soon as I can. Even just loose notes. Charged with drug-induced hubris, I'm determined to get people closer to this experience than anyone else has so far. I'll write entire books if I have to. They need to know. But every minute that goes by I realize more and more that the magic box I've just been inside can only be understood by those who've climbed inside as well.
After Terence drifts off to sleep anxiety takes one last, fierce stab at me. Menacing shadows. Paranoia. Ready for it all to end, but the drug is lingering. I shed the last layers of fear over the next couple of hours while Terence dreams beside me. I put on headphones and listen to Sam Harris's essay on drugs again. I consider writing him a letter.
At sunrise, I go outside. The cool desert air hits my skin exactly like it did yesterday, but I feel reborn. I know I'll never be the same. I know that whatever I face, the rest of my life, I have this strength to call on. Staring down the demons that live inside of me, scraping myself along the edge of sanity inch by inch, hopeless and unsure what I was even fighting for. And then the reward. The secrets I was shown. The beauty I cannot reproduce for you here, on this page, even though I would give anything to. The glimpse of the world within, and what it holds for willing explorers.
Forty years. I know nothing.
